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Olli Jokinen not exactly happy to be here: DiManno

Olli Jokinen’s eyebrows shot up when he emerged from the Maple Leaf dressing room to confront a phalanx of two-dozen expectant reporters.

Not the kind of post-practice scrum to which the Finnish veteran is accustomed. Freshly jettisoned from Nashville and now with his 10th NHL team. A guy who’s been a frequent healthy scratch this season as a Predator. A footnote, really, in this past weekend’s trade that saw Cody Franson and Mike Santorelli peel off the Leaf logo, probably but not necessarily forever. And the exes were not even actually gone, their paperwork still incomplete, both players on hand Monday morning to make their long goodbyes to teammates.

But they’ve made it over the wall, busted out, their version of The Great Escape from the internment camp which the Leaf club has become in these waning months of a deeply unsettling 2014-15 campaign.

While Jokinen did not sound particularly thrilled about being here, despite a kiss-off tweet from Mrs. J to the Preds: “Never did like mustard yellow.”

Wouldn’t get too attached to blue and white. The prevailing view is that 36-year-old Jokinen won’t be around for longer than a latte and a slice of leipajuusto before being on-dealt at the trade deadline or thereabouts.

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Well, why would the fellow be turning cartwheels, shunted from the league’s top team to its fifth-worst, with not a tinker’s damn chance of making the playoffs while the ’mates left behind are girding themselves for a nice long post-season run?

First question posed: How long do you expect to stay here?

“I don’t know. Right now I’m a Maple Leaf and I’ll take it day by day. As a player, you go to a new team, you try to fit in the room, you’ve got a job to do. You’ve got to respect the game, you’ve got to respect the players you play with. And you’ve got to enjoy playing this game, that’s the bottom line. You do what they tell you to do.”

It’s not exactly servitude. Toronto had to take on Jokinen’s salary — $2.5 million he’d signed for in Nashville, on a one-year contract, last July. But the Leafs still come out of the swap with a first-round draft pick, promising prospect Brendan Leipsic, and clearing some $2.3 million of salary cap space which is crucial as GM Dave Nonis maneuvers to reinvent the roster lickety-split.

Almost wistfully, Jokinen pointed out that he chose to ink with Nashville when there were other offers on the table — we’ll take him at his word — precisely because the Predators were an upswing club. With 1,217 NHL games under his belt, he’d played in only half a dozen playoff games. “I thought they had a chance to go far. I signed there as a centreman. I don’t know what happened between July 2 and training camp.”

What he meant is that the Predators, to his displeasure, put him on the wing, and that might account for a mere six points this season, averaging about 13 minutes of ice time. “I was very uncomfortable. I never played the wing before in my life. I don’t go to the coaches and tell them to put me in the centre. I tried to do my role best I can. Obviously, about two weeks ago, what I was doing was not good enough anymore. And now I’m here.”

Coach Peter Horachek said he’ll play Jokinen at centre, where the Leafs are just as weak as they are, especially now, on the blueline.

Not a surprise, getting traded. Again. To Toronto, however, “a big surprise.”

Hands in his pockets, looking quite downcast, Jokinen struggled to put a positive spin on his situation, especially when asked if he was happy to be here. Like he’d say, are you crazy, I want to open a vein. “Yeah, absolutely. Why wouldn’t I be?”

Um, because the Leafs stink? Because they’re in rebuild mode, seeking out draft picks and youth and protracted reconfiguration? Because it’s become a race to the bottom and cranking up the lottery odds for Connor McDavid?

“You know what? You’re still in the NHL. You can have the experience to play in an Original Six team. Everything here is first class. So, this is the way it is now. I’ll do my best here.”

While this was going on, McDavid was suiting up for an afternoon tilt in Mississauga, his Otters versus the Steelheads. There was the juicy future on display.

The game marches on while the Leafs remain out of step, stuttering to a transition-pending halt that demands, one more time, patience and nurturing. Leafs have never been good at that.

The objective now is to take a truncheon to the roster, useful Daniel Winnik purportedly the next Leaf to be auctioned for a decent draft pick return. “It’s just rumours,” he said yesterday. “When it happens, it happens.”

Notice he didn’t say if.

One might think that dangled Leafs would be over-the-moon at the chance to get out of Dodge, enjoying a new lease on life on a club bound for the post-season. Because, as Winnik noted: “The situation we’re in, you know that it’s probably going to be to a playoff team. I don’t think a non-playoff team is going to trade for a pending UFA.”

Yet just about every player, for public consumption at least, professes no enthusiasm for moving on and away. “It’s unfortunate we’ve been losing but everyone in this room wants to play (here), no one really wants to leave,” said Winnik. “They call (Toronto) the centre of hockey. Everyone loves the game in Toronto.” Then added: “I’m sure they kind of hate it right now.”

Mystifying how Winnik and Franson and Nazem Kadri and Phil Kessel and all the Leafs cited in recent trade talks are all the time talking about what a great group this is. Great at what, exactly? Not hockey, not collectively.

So we demolish.

Think nude Miley Cyrus, licking a mallet and straddling that Wrecking Ball, in her soft-porn video.

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